nir: Add intrinsics for register access
Note the writemask handling is chosen for consistency with the rest of NIR. In
every other instance, writemask=w requires a vec4 source. This is hardcoded into
nir_validate and nir_print as what it means to have a writemask.
More importantly, consistency with how register writemasks currently work.
nir_print hides it, but r0.w = fneg ssa_1.x is actually a vec4 instruction with
source ssa_1.xxxx. As a silly example nir_dest_num_components(that) = 4 in the
old model. I realize this is quite strange coming from a scalar ISA, but it's
perfectly natural for the class of vec4 hardware for which this was designed. In
that hardware, conceptually all instructions are vec4`, so the sequence "fneg
ssa_1 and write to channel w" is implemented as "fneg a vec4 with ssa_1.x in the
last component and write that vec4 out but mask to write only the w channel".
Isn't this inefficient? It can be. To save power, Midgard has scalar ALUs in
addition to vec4 ALUs. Those details are confined to the backend VLIW scheduler;
the instruction selection is still done as vec4. This mechanism has little in
common with AMD's SALUs. Midgard has a wave size of 1, with special hacks for
derivatives.
As a result, all backends consuming register writemasks are expecting this
pattern of code. Changing the store to take a vec1 instead of a vec4 would
require changing every backend to reswizzle the sources to resurrect the vec4. I
started typing a branch to do this yesterday, but it made a mess of both Midgard
and nir-to-tgsi. Without any good reason to think it'd actually help
performance, I abandoned the idea. Getting all 15 backends converted to the
helpers is enough of a challenge without forcing 10 backends to reswizzle their
sources too.
Signed-off-by: Alyssa Rosenzweig <alyssa@rosenzweig.io>
Reviewed-by: Faith Ekstrand <faith.ekstrand@collabora.com>
Part-of: <https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/23089>